When She Was Bad... by Louise Bagshawe Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t
     
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    have the right stuff to wind up an English lady, sugar. So just skip this one, huh? You could have anybody you wanted.’
    Yeah, Lita thought, but I want Rupert Lancaster.
    She knew exactly what Bill meant. She was Hispanic. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t have the right look to be an English lady. They both knew that ifLita put her mind to it she could find some stiff tweed skirts and pussy-necked white blouses and dress exactly like Princess Margaret. It was more that she didn’t have the right skin to be an English lady.
    Lira stole a glance at herself in the large mirrored door to Bill’s office. She looked hip and gorgeous, but she also looked exotic. She loved her own looks, she had never lied to herself about that. But for the first time in her fife, she examined her exquisite caf{-au-lait complexion and wished it were just a little lighter. But, hey, maybe Fisher had it all wrong. He was gay. He’d underestimate just how far a man would go for a woman he loved and lusted after. Mick Jagger had married Bianca, hadn’t he? And Lennon was all loved-up with Yoko. It was true that the upper-class Brits didn’t seem to cross boundaries that much, but there was a first time for everything. Some of their old kings had married Spanish and Portuguese queens. So why not a lord? They were marrying commoners all the time. If she went to England, she’d just be seen as an American model; nobody would know she was from the Bronx …
    ‘Lira. Quit it. I know what you’re doing. Don’t.’ Bill stood. ‘If he calls, you can go to the screen test, but doff’t become another notch on
    the bedpost. You’ll thank me for it one day.’
    ‘Sure, Bill. Whatever you say.’
    ‘I fixed up some appointments for you to go see apartments,’ he
    added, trying to distract her.
    ‘Apartments?’
    ‘You said you wanted to move into the city.’ Bill tossed her a Village Voice with various addresses ringed in pen. ‘Forget the Costa 1Kica campaign and the limey. This is gonna take you all day. And one more piece of advice? Wear flats.’
     
    He was right about the shoes, Lita reflected. She’d ignored his advice the way she usually did, but after the Gucci straps had rubbed off a layer of skin she’d given in and taken a cab to Macy’s. Now she was in blessedly comfortable, hideously un-hip white sneakers. The sun had sunk over the towering glass-and-concrete forest of the city. She had seen eight places, and she had five more to go before she called it quits. They were dumps. Pretty much all of them. One was about as large as
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    her room back in Soundview; another had a concrete ceiling so low that anyone over five-eight would have to stoop; then there was the walk up that involved seven flights of stairs, the basement apartment with the leaky pipes running across the ceiling, and the former hostel that she ran right out of because she could actually see the bugs scuttling across the floor.
    But she was hooked. With each shitty apartment, Lira got a little more excited. No way was she going to live in one of these dumps, but they were all here. In Manhattan. Where men like lkupert Lancaster did the club scene. Where girls schmoozed with the power players and got the big jobs and the big cheques. The fact that landlords thought they could get away with asking outrageous rents for these places excited her; they were on the market only because people were desperate to live here, to be part of the cool set. If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere, went the song, but what it didn’t say was that unless you made it here you went nowhere.
    Manhattan was the brass ring. If it weren’t, Bill wouldn’t have sent her to these dives with a straight face.
    Lira made up her mind. She wasn’t going home without a signed lease. She was moving to Manhattan, and she was moving there today.
    The next place she looked at was another dump. The one after that was only a dump-ette. Lira pinned the